"I'm not sticking a priceless book in goop!"
"It's not goop, it's gel, and everything will be fine. I promise."
Whoever invented stasis gel was a sadist and I heartily approve. If you're going to design something specifically for the purposes of preserving items, you should totally make it from a substance that looks like it would utterly ruin whatever you put into it. What better for books than a purple gel?
Probably Not the Original Intent
Being fair, this probably wasn't the original goal of the inventor. We have a ton of notes on how it interacts with humans and animals, and how it might eventually lead to a breakthrough in stasis pods for lifeforms. Someone definitely wanted to live to the next century.
Whatever the intent, it proved all but useless on organisms, even very small ones. Someone probably dropped their notes in, realized what happened, and thus they fixed focus onto the actual useful tech.
It's a two part technology. First, the gel itself, a rather sophisticated substance that's a lot of fun to make. Second, the apparatus that keeps it in a solid state so that the items don't just sink down into a heap, introducing a particular energy into the mix that also helps the items stop decaying.
Dunk It
The gel works best when the item is submerged entirely. It almost entirely stops the degradation of whatever is put into it. Books, ancient artifacts, even things like floppy disks and CDs and other computer storage devices. The chemicals are non-toxic, and they slide right off the items when pulled out.
Archival Wardens depend heavily on it, because it also obscures any electronic signals that might be involved, and limit how much scanning can be done, even from close range.
In the history of its use, there's only a few random cases of stasis gel negatively affecting items placed in it. And by negatively, I mean that the item remained goopy when removed from the gel. Even then, the gel is less the problem than whatever they did to clean off the gel.
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